Among the myriad of SharePoint functions and features comes the personal site, which is surprisingly intuitive considering we’ve had great practice with this style of ‘social media’ profile for many a year now.

What is the purpose of ‘My Site’?

• To provide a centralised hub to view and manage documents, tasks, calendars, and employee communication.
• To facilitate the process of sharing targeted information from a management point of view.
• To provide a common platform for employees to engage each other on a social level.
• To provide access to and management of workflows.

All of which can be modified with access permissions, which gives the organisation full control of the flow and access of information.

So what makes ‘My Site’ tick?

My Site consists of two parts, your personal site called “My Home” and your public profile page called “My Profile”. You are the administrator of your ‘My Site’ which gives you full control over the flow and presentation of every piece of content. The “My Profile” part of ‘My Site’ consists of the following:

a)      Newsfeed:  Provides the user with a feed of all content related to their job and communication permissions. The newsfeed also has full search capabilities in the form of, yup you guessed it, hashtags. All the usual functionality applies, such as following people, following documents, list access and even mentions.

b)      About Me: Provides viewers of your profile access to important information regarding your skills, character and contact details. Creating a bio which includes

c)       Blog: Provides the user with full access to the company blog which allows the user to create new posts, manage posts, manage categories, comments and even modify blog layout. All without having to access the blog back-end.

d)      Tasks:  Here you can create, manage and even synchronise your tasks with Outlook.

e)      Apps: Allows access to site content with the apps on the SkyDrive site.

f)       Links: Allows you to manage important links such as lists and access sites. Other departments within your organisation can create personalised sites with access permissions specific to your department or position. For example:  HR could create you a site where you can view your paid leave, download your payroll etc.

g)      Search: The ‘My Site’ search is incredibly powerful, with it you can search for absolutely anything within your SharePoint Intranet. Additionally the search function makes full use of hashtags. The Search function is also extremely helpful within a large corporation, where for example: you may need to collaborate on a project which requires very specific skills, however you might not even know the people’s names who possess these skills, but with the search function you can search for those specific skills and find the perfect colleagues for the job.

Your SharePoint ‘My Site’ acts as the main portal with which you access your SharePoint activities and communicate within your organisation. It is an incredibly intuitive and elegant solution, which makes it extremely easy to learn and adopt. Your ‘My Site’ also allows you to customise the presentation of and access to information, tasks, users and communication which gives the user administrative privileges without requiring back-end development or actual administrative access.

Sound Idea Digital is a full service digital agency | www.soundidea.co.za

Julian Karstel is a Digital Marketing Consultant for Sound Idea Digital | Julian@soundidea.co.za